"I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority."
As an engineer, I understand why you are scared that "global-supply management" is getting involved. But you forget that the volumes that Apple works at have changed in the last 10 years, to the point where new products need to be manufactured at launch, in quantity that no one else in the industry has ever heard off. Good old days where you could manufacture 1 million iPhones in the first quarter and be happy, those days are over.
So pay a bit of respect to global-supply management. Manufacturing is actually as respectable as engineering. Just different concepts, but both optimize under heavy constraints to achieve near-impossible goals (at least at Apple).
I think that a lot of people that only have experience with software see "Supply Chain Management", and think a suit who's only there to be an impediment to creating stuff.
They're really not. They're easily as important to the successful design and production of hardware as any of the engineers. The engineers come up with the ideas and products. Supply chain management and manufacturing are the ones that make those products and get them out to the public.
The supply chain people are the ones who are going out and negotiating the contracts for parts, and are the ones who are responsible for making sure that everything is getting shipped at the proper time(and for the proper price). It's a lot of work, and good supply managers aren't there to order the engineers around. They're there to work with them, and make sure that everyone involved knows exactly what risks every change will have on the final product.
Apple's real innovation is in supply management (well that and iTunes)
Anyone can make a thin smooth aluminium laptop. Being in the position of making the premium priced top of the range product, while paying far less for your components than your big box competitors and having such a stranglehold hold on supplies of those components that you can keep competitors out is amazing.
It's as if Audi not only made great cars - but also had all the worlds supply of tires and engines and was paying half as much as chevy for them!
I feel like this is ignoring the tough decisions Job's made when they didn't have the supply chain. The original iPod was priced at US$399 and US$499. It had very few features and most people called it lame.
When Job's decided to remove floppy disk drives and made iMacs that you couldn't upgrade the components from computers people called it lame. (This really upset people)
When the first iPad came out most people called it lame. (Has everyone already forgotten this? People were screaming it was going to fail, because it didn't run OSX).
To dismiss Apples success as only dependent on supply chain management is missing the mark in my opinion. Apples success in a large way hinged on Jobs ability to make decisions that in the immediate would piss people off but in the long term seem obvious.
Apple's CURRENT (and future) $$$$ success is now because of their supply chain.
Yes they have some very nice products - but what has moved them from a niche supplier of shiny toys for the 'money > sense' crowd to a gaziilion $$ market cap - is that their excellence in delivering on these products.
A lot of this feeds into the the products. They don't need cheesy Blah inside stickers because they don't need to earn that extra $0.50 They don't have to bend over to the demands of Walmart buyers or chase the latest fad because they are in a position to decide the fad.
But they don't have a unique technical skill. They have an Intel CPU, an NVidia card and a li-ion battery in an aluminium case with a Unix OS and a pretty gui. It's delivering this package at that price with that margin that now makes them special.
While I don't disagree that Apple's technical skill isn't best of breed, where Apple has shined - both now and in the past - is their ruthless determination and focus on UX and HCI. Apple goes further than any company on the planet to make technology devices (computers, laptops, music players, tablets, etc) that delight their users and just work and make them happier and more productive.
Apple doesn't have "cheesy blah inside" stickers because that doesn't delight users and make the product better to use. They're stupid. Apple also doesn't chase fads because fads are just that, "a fad" and rarely do fads have long lasting staying power like a good product should.
I'm not sure that Apple's UX is that much better than Windows7/Gnome/Unity. They have done a very good job of making it easy for you to buy from them with the integration of iTunes but a single button mouse and a single menubar at the top doesn't necessarily make every app easier to use.
Where they do shine is in build quality and user experience which comes from owning the entire product - HW/OS/sales channel/support - and having enough margin to do it well. That's the difference between them and an equally specced Sony laptop running Windows.
It's the profit margin that really makes them special. Sony used to make products of this design and build quality but then to compete had to cut costs and so quality and had to accept the bloatware and stickers. Apple's brilliance has been in managing the process so that they can cut production costs while increasing quality and adding more stuff.
I give a huge amount of credit to Cook for this. Jobs demanding rounded corners on dialogs or sticking to a single button mouse whatever focus groups said was good technical leadership, Ive's produce design is great. But dominating the manufacture and supply network to the extent that Apple have done and with the effectiveness they have done is a major achievement and is not easy.
Look at Boeing having to delay the 7E7 because it couldn't get rivets - while Apple has 747 freighters booked ready to fly new products straight to the store the day they are released.
>I'm not sure that Apple's UX is that much better than Windows7/Gnome/Unity.
... this is insanity. These UXs you refer to are Apple copies that were released years after the Apple UX. Windows7 has a nice UX because Apple forced it to. People were abandoning Windows for OSX, so Microsoft invested in their UX.
Your comment is like saying, "Henry Ford's Model T was no big deal. It's hardly even better than my 1990 Honda Civic." No shit!!!!
That's a non-sequitor and you have now changed the goalposts of the discussion. The discussion is about what got Apple its marketshare in the first place.
I would argue that Apple's innovation is also in the operating systems and the applications they provide. iOS and Mac OS X is for my use far superior to any of the alternatives. Not everyone likes them, but everyone around me (90%-95% or so) have switched to Apple operating systems and hardware due to ease of use. This together with the fully integrated experience: OS, app store, media store (iTunes), hardware is why the competition is floundering. This stack is costly and hard to compete with.
As an engineer, I understand why you are scared that "global-supply management" is getting involved. But you forget that the volumes that Apple works at have changed in the last 10 years, to the point where new products need to be manufactured at launch, in quantity that no one else in the industry has ever heard off. Good old days where you could manufacture 1 million iPhones in the first quarter and be happy, those days are over.
So pay a bit of respect to global-supply management. Manufacturing is actually as respectable as engineering. Just different concepts, but both optimize under heavy constraints to achieve near-impossible goals (at least at Apple).